1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for automatically processing captured document images. More particularly, this invention relates to systems and methods for automatically recognizing the font of printed text.
2. Description of Related Art
A document image may be captured and converted to digital signals (pixels) by an image capture device, such as a scanner or a facsimile machine. Subsequent processing of these digital signals may include outputting to an image output terminal such as a viewing device or printer, data compression to a more compact format, or optical character recognition. A useful step in each of these exemplary subsequent processes is the automatic determination of the text font used in the document. Examples of the text fonts include, Postscript 10-point Helvetica, 12-point Helvetica-Bold, 11-point Times-Roman, and the like. Such text can be considered a connected component. A connected component is an xe2x80x9cislandxe2x80x9d of black pixels in a binary scan of a document, that is a set of black pixels, connected diagonally or orthogonally, one to another, and surrounded by white.
The methods and systems of this invention can automatically determine the text fonts in a captured image.
The methods and systems of this invention provide automatic determination of the text fonts in a captured image in a simple accurate, and language independent manner with the ability to work with smaller samples of text than previous methods.
In various exemplary embodiments of the methods and systems according to this invention, training data is used to determine characteristics of a sample of the captured image.
In one exemplary embodiment of the methods and systems according to this invention, the training data is divided into groups, according to sizes of bounding boxes.
In one exemplary embodiment of the methods and systems according to this invention, the training data for each group processed to give the probability for each chain code segment and the probability of each successive pair of chain code segments.
In various exemplary embodiments of the methods and systems according to this invention, the training data includes training sets of various font types.
In various exemplary embodiments of the methods and systems according to this invention, chain code segments for each connected component""s boundary in the sample of the captured image data are determined. A chain code is a sequence of north/south/east/west directions taken while traversing the boundary of a connected component.
In one exemplary embodiment of the methods and systems according to this invention, for each training set, training data is grouped according to bounding boxes, with each group having a bounding box size.
In various exemplary embodiments of the methods and systems according to this invention, the font type of the captured image data is determined from the determined probabilities of the training data.
These and other features and advantages of this invention are described in or are apparent from the following detailed description of various exemplary embodiments.